Data management and analysis
Movebank offers a variety of tools to process and analyze data. Most tools implemented directly within Movebank focus on preparing data for analysis and archiving. We also encourage the development of other applications for advanced data analysis that work with Movebank-format data. See the Tools section on Movebank for up-to-date information about Movebank-compatible tools available outside of movebank.org. Most third-party tools use Movebank's REST API to securely access data.
Users should begin by reading our discussion on deployments and outliers to understand how Movebank enables data owners to refine their original sensor data by excluding (1) measurements collected before and after deployment and (2) measurements that should be ignored for analysis, such as location outliers.
Management tools
In addition to interactive Movebank offers several tools for quality control and management of data. Within each study, these tools are available to users who are Data Managers for the study.
-
Live data feeds: Automate data import and management procedures for in-progress studies by subscribing to stream data into Movebank for supported manufacturers and data providers.
-
The Deployment Manager: Review, add and edit associations between tags and animals (deployments) as well as reference data describing the tags, animals and deployments in the study.
-
The Event Editor: Interactively select and view data in map and tabular formats, apply data filters, manually flag outliers, add and remove data attributes.
-
Data Filters: Filter data to look for and flag events as outliers based on a variety of parameters.
The Env-DATA System
The Environmental Data Automated Track Annotation System (Env-DATA) offers a user-friendly interface to browse and request annotation of hundreds of environmental parameters from global remote sensing and weather reanalysis products. These parameters can be annotated to animal tracking data stored in Movebank, or to other time-location records relevant to movement ecology analysis.
MoveApps
The MoveApps analysis platform is currently released in beta version and is available for use. The platform allows users to flexibly combine multiple Apps to create workflows that analyze data from the Movebank database in a code-free, easy-to-use, web-based application. The Apps are created by the Movebank team or the broader coding community. Apps are citable, and workflows can be shared and published in the Movebank Data Repository.
Additional guidance
Summary advice for some common and specialized use cases:
Data management and analysis
Quality control of uploaded data